By Eduardo Lamazon*

Life for most animals can hardly be described as such. That is, it early on ceases to be life in the greater sense of the term, quickly devolving into an intense pain that serves as punishment for going along with a human coexistence that is entirely out of their control. Read the rest of this entry »

“Excerpts from a Dog’s Diary”
8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00pm - Lunch! My favorite thing!
1:00 pm - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 pm - Milk bones! My favorite thing!
7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 pm - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing! Read the rest of this entry »

Dateline: Thursday, 13 September, 2007

A heartwarming story from China: The abandoned monkey who has found love with a pigeon.

LOVE AND KINDNESS…TRANSCEND ALL

They’re an odd couple in every sense but a monkey and a pigeon have become inseparable at an animal sanctuary in China. The 12-week-old macaque - who was abandoned by his mother - was close to death when it was rescued on Neilingding Island, in Goangdong Province.

After being taken to an animal hospital his health began to improve but he seemed spiritless - until he developed a friendship with a white pigeon. The blossoming relationship helped to revive the macaque who has developed a new lease of life, say staff at the sanctuary.

[Item research by M. Cichy]

BY STEVEN BEST

A “downed” cow dragged to slaughter. Transportation to the slaughterhouse is just the culmination of her awful fate. “Downers” are animals who have been severely injured or become ill in the process of being raised “for food.”

Other “downers”—this time a couple of hogs, one of which cannot stand at all, also waiting to be taken to the abattoir. How much suffering must transpire before humans start paying real attention to our species’ atrocious tyranny over fellow creatures? Although many will surely deny it, including quite a few on the Left, it’s clear that human supremacist attitudes easily qualify as the earliest and least recognized form for fascism. Factory farms, by treating living, breathing animals as mere cogs in an ruthless industrial profit machine, are one of its most obscene manifestations. How long are we going to allow this to go on?

“Animal liberation may sound more like a parody of other liberation movements than a serious objective.” —Peter Singer

“Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the `final frontier.’” —Robin Webb, British ALF Press Officer

Introduction: Framing the Unframed Issue

It seems lost on most of the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Left that there is a new liberation movement on the planet – animal liberation – that is of immense ethical and political significance. But because animal liberation challenges the anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist dogmas that are so deeply entrenched in socialist and anarchist thinking and traditions, Leftists are more likely to mock than engage it. Read the rest of this entry »

BY PETER SINGER
DATELINE: October 2006

Most factory-farmed animals are confined for life in completely unnatural surroundings, reduced to mere abstract units denied the status of living creatures, and manipulated relentlessly to maximize profits. Alongside Big Pharma, agribusiness is one of the most corrupting influences in American politics.

For low meat prices, the animals, the environment and rural neighborhoods pay steeply.

There is a growing consensus that factory farming of animals - also known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations - is morally wrong. The American animal rights movement, which in its early years focused largely on the use of animals in research, now has come to see that factory farming represents by far the greater abuse of animals. The numbers speak for themselves. In the United States somewhere between 20 million and 40 million birds and mammals are killed for research every year. That might seem like a lot - and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for their fur, let alone the relatively tiny number used in circuses - but 40 million represents less than two days’ toll in America’s slaughterhouses, which kill about 10 billion animals each year. Read the rest of this entry »